Category End of term activities

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Following the recent Christmas 2016 Christmas collection – an update – try a Desmos Christmas present!Having reminded Year 8 about equations of lines and developed the topic this year, this Desmos Christmas present graph will make a good starter. They can identify the lines, hopefully quickly!

We can also discuss that bow! Whilst we don’t study equations of circles until Year 10 or 11, I will frequently “plant ideas” earlier so when students meet them later they have at least heard of them! Younger students can easily be asked for points that satisfy x2+y2=25 for example.

Christmas Relay – Problem Solving Puzzles

On TES we have a complete set of relays from Chris Smith; my classes have enjoyed his Valebtine and Summer relays, I think we’ll use the Christmas relay to complete this term! You can find more excellent resources from Chris on TES and follow him on Twitter here.

As with all the these relays from Chris – all the answers are provided – brilliant!

Mark McCourt has a great collection of Christmas Activities on his Emaths site. These resources include a lovely variety of activities for your students to do some valuable Maths as well as getting in the Christmas mood!

December means Advent Calendars and Nrich have published two Advent Calendars, one for Primary and one for Secondary each containing twenty-four problem-solving activities, one for each day in the run-up to Christmas. The primary Calendar tasks focus on encouraging mathematical habits of mind and the Secondary tasks have been chosen to encourage mathematical creativity.

Alex Pett created his advent calendar complete with history and problems for each day. Alex has provided a pdf versionor use as aGoogle document. For an Activeinspire resource this versionalso has sound.

From Oxford University Press a very helpful emailwith some Christmas resources, some more problems to solve and some star decorations to make for your classroom. The festive Venn diagrams I referred to in the previous Christmas postwhich has many ideas for Christmas are included too.

The A Level assessments look very useful – collections of exam style questions which include solutions and mark schemes. I always find it useful to have resources like this to use in class. Thank you OUP!

So – just a few days to go. I have a couple of Year 12 (UK age 16-17) lessons left. We have done everything we should and made a very good start to the Year 13 course – so what to do for the very last lesson? These logic puzzles from John Prattshould keep us happily and usefully occupied. (I have added these to the Puzzles page on Mathematics Games.) Or we could try another Kakuro Puzzle, studentswere fascinated by these when introduced to the puzzles by a member of the class. At the end of the year we ask Year 12 students to do a presentation to their peers which works well.

Still thinking about games, I see that in the latest Nrich newsletter, Strategy games are featured for Primary teachers; these would also be useful for lower secondary.

This week I was pleased to see the new podcast from TES, ‘The Big Conference Interview Special’ which features interviews with some of the speakers from the TSM conference and includes the pros and cons of using iPads in the classroom, a new curriculum for post 16s and an in-depth discussion about what the new UK mathematics curriculum will look like. At about 16.5 minutes in you can catch Criag Barton talking to me about the use of technology in the Mathematics classroom. The links I refer to can all be found in the slides here.

The school year is coming to an end for teachers in the UK and looking at the statistics for recent popular posts I can see people have been searching for end of term activities. I have recently updated this post with suggestions for such activities. Recent additions include fun with some plots on WolframAlpha; there are in fact a whole family of Star Wars curves!See also many other fun curves!

If those WolframAlpha equations are a bit much for younger students they could try something simpler using the Desmos graphing calculator; look at Alec Schultz’s PacMan for example, you could just show your students how to restrict the domain for straight lines, maybe show them the equation of a circle and see what they can produce! For more Desmos art have a look at this wonderful collection! (I have added a post to Mathematics for Students to show how to display parts of lines and circles on Demos)

Wishing teachers everywhere a happy holiday(only WolframAlpha would give you the Scrabble score as well as the definition!). For teachers already on holiday I hope you are having a great one.